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When the eyes say buy: visual fixations during hypothetical consumer choice improve prediction of actual purchases

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 January 2025

Taisuke Imai Open the ORCID record for Taisuke Imai [Opens in a new window] ,
Min Jeong Kang  and
Colin F. Camerer Open the ORCID record for Colin F. Camerer [Opens in a new window]
Taisuke Imai*
Affiliation:
Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Munich, Germany
Min Jeong Kang*
Affiliation:
California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA
Colin F. Camerer*
Affiliation:
California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA
*
e-mail: [email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
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Abstract

Consumers typically overstate their intentions to purchase products, compared to actual rates of purchases, a pattern called “hypothetical bias”. In laboratory choice experiments, we measure participants’ visual attention using mousetracking or eye-tracking, while they make hypothetical as well as real purchase decisions. We find that participants spent more time looking both at price and product image prior to making a real “buy” decision than making a real “don’t buy” decision. We demonstrate that including such information about visual attention improves prediction of real buy decisions. This improvement is evident, although small in magnitude, using mousetracking data, but is not evident using eye-tracking data.

Keywords

MousetrackingEye-trackingHypothetical biasPrediction

JEL classification

D12: Consumer Economics: Empirical Analysis D90: General‡ C91: Laboratory, Individual Behavior
Type
Original Paper
Information
Journal of the Economic Science Association , Volume 5 , Issue 1: Special Issue: Choice-Process Data in Experimental Economics , August 2019 , pp. 112 - 122
Copyright
Copyright © Economic Science Association 2019

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Footnotes

This paper is based on part of Ph.D. dissertation of Taisuke Imai. Authors thank Daw-An Wu and Rahul Bhui for their help with data collection and analysis. This work was supported by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Imai acknowledges financial support from the Nakajima Foundation and Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft through CRC TRR 190.

Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s40881-019-00071-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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